


The Eyes of Horrorterrors

by liquidCitrus



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Homestuck
Genre: Allegory, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Babysitting, Boats and Ships, Brainwashing, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Existential Horror, Gen, Gods, Magical Realism, Male-Female Friendship, Metaphors, Origin Myths, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Universebuilding, Worldbuilding, abuse survivors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4180860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danielle Wattson, an ex-Sburb player who decided not to go through the Door at the end of her session, is picked up by a boat that delivers her to a mysterious Town, an island of reality in the middle of a multicolored void called the Outside.</p>
<p>There she is drawn into the affairs of the Bleak Academy, a university run by a man who may well be the god of Death himself...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Full of Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on the blog [A User's Guide to the Apocalypse](http://eternity-braid.tumblr.com/).
> 
> The first chapter of this work was written as a standalone work. Then it grew, and grew.
> 
> By the third or fourth chapter I realized I had a full-sized short story on my hands. By the sixth chapter I realized that I'd accidentally written in some Legit Literary Themes about how to approach the world. (Because yes, you can apparently write those in on accident.) It wasn't until halfway through the seventh chapter that I realized I was writing the ending.
> 
> For those of you coming here from my Replay Value AU fanfiction, this work is _not_ from Replay Value AU. It uses a few setting elements from that Sburb because RV Sburb was already in my head. But that's all.

## 0

I still check my eyes in the mirror every morning, to see if my eyes have gone night-black and full of stars. I've been - out of _there_ \- for almost three months. I've been in Town, where the sun is solid and the air is bright, for a month.

But the Headmaster comes here to Town, doesn't he? And could he not sidle up to my window, and reach into my eyes and unscrew them, like lightbulbs?

So I check.

They're still hazel. Of course they're hazel. Why would they ever not be?

The light of the sun sparkles off the basin of water I've drawn. I extinguish these sparkles by dropping a towel on the water, and then begin to wash my face.

* * *

## 1

My father used to wake me up and pull me out into the woods, in the middle of the night. We - and then I, alone - camped, under the stars at midnight with only what I could grab in five minutes. I'd hated it. He made my life unpredictable, told me that this was what life was like - that the world simply wouldn't give a damn about you, and that you had to grab what you could and run if you wanted to survive.

And then the sky turned bright with meteors, one night, and I played a game, and the game destroyed the Earth and took me into another world.

I was good at that game. I had to be; I already knew what it was like to hunt. It was actually easier, in some ways. The enemies in the Game did not track scent and so I didn't have to worry about being downwind. I had a crossbow, and when that failed I had my fists, and when _that_ failed - well, that was an opportunity to become more than I was, so of course I took it.

My coplayers were... all right, I suppose. They were as good as they could have been, given the circumstances. But they didn't understand. They wouldn't take it seriously - _couldn't_ take it seriously. I managed to herd them through and keep them all alive (or as alive as possible, given the circumstances). I could've let one of them die, to show the others what it was really like. I certainly had many opportunities to. But I didn't, because that would be unfair and pointless.

Life was unfair and pointless, and I was better than that.

I knew, even then, that I needed to use my knowledge that life was that fragile to keep other people from realizing the same. Because they'd be happier, if they didn't know.

* * *

## 2

Professor - he never told me his name, and nobody ever called him anything other than the Professor - he told me that I'd already been broken from the beginning, just that I'd fixed it wrong. Like when you break a bone and don't set it and it the bone knits back together with a crook in it, an angle.

I knew, had always known, that something wasn't right about how life was, about how _reality_ was. But instead of resolving then that reality was wrong I decided that I would cling harder to it instead. Maybe that was something I decided by myself. Maybe that was something the Game decided for me. Maybe it was something that I'd remembered, from my father telling stories under the stars while I tried to dry my socks next to a campfire, having forgotten to bring an extra pair. Either way I'd stowed my reasons for what I became so deeply into my memory that I didn't know what they were.

Did the Game make me a Guide of Mind, or was I already one from the beginning?

"And thus, we come to the point of this metaphor -" and he looked at me intently - "do you know what the treatment is for such cases?"

To fix a broken bone that sets wrong you need to break it again.

* * *

## 3

This story is in fragments because my memory is in fragments. I know, for instance, what it felt like to dry my socks under the stars, but I don't remember what my father was saying; and there are equally many instances of the reverse - of remembering the touch of a cool and dry hand, a candy bar frozen to eat in the summer, two pairs of shoes tied to the back of a truck bumping along in front of us on the highway, without understanding when they happened or _why_ they were important.

I guess it's part of human variation. There are some people who have photographic memories; and so there must be some people on the other side of the bell curve that have no memories at all, or memories all jumbled and broken like mine. It's unfair, but it's unfair in the same way that everything else about life is unfair.

People have this thing they do, that they think that having a massive deficit on one part of the scale must thus give you character points to spend on a bonus on the other end. They look at me, and think that ah, I must have traded my memory for my intelligence and charisma and ability to walk through a forest without making a sound.

They don't say quite the same things about people for whom the dice turn out badly. Or rather they do, and try to paper over the obvious discrepancies by saying that the stillborn child must've had so much faith and goodness in it that it simply couldn't walk among mortal men, or that surely someone who will never have an IQ above that of a carrot brings joy to the life of those who take care of him.

Sometimes things are just unfair.

A lot of them are unfair in my direction, though. So I try not to complain.

* * *

## 4

I didn't want what the Game wanted to offer me as a reward, and I didn't want to spend eternity with the people in my session, so after everyone else went through the door I went among the meteors of the Veil and waited. The backdrop of the Medium is a velvet black, an infinite void. But then there were - there were things that looked like stars, coming out, in the sky.

I squinted. They weren't stars. They were Horrorterror eyes.

A tall ship came, then - gliding, impossibly, through the void. At first I saw a keel all cluttered with barnacles - some white, some gray, but a profusion of other colors too, purple and green and even a few specks of gold. And then I noticed that the rudder turned up and down, not just sideways, and the ship came swinging down.

I stuck out my thumb like a hitchhiker, and they came to me, and that is how I was brought to Town.

Of course then I was an idiot and left shortly afterwards.

* * *

## 5

Yesterday there was a storm.

The Outside comes washing in, here, over Fortitude, and tries to take sense away. It really can't take very much sense away - there's too many people here doing too much sense-making for it to do any real damage - but it batters against the shutters on the windows and it batters against me.

I know it batters against me more than for other people because Anya's family doesn't even _have_ a storm-cellar, which means that there are enough people here for whom this is just daily life that there was no point building one. They sit in the living room and read newspapers by lamplight until the storm passes. None of _them_ have to shut themselves inside their closets and put earplugs in.

The Outside wants me back, wants to finish unmaking me. I know it in my bones, know it as well as my name, know that where other people merely see the restrained wrongness of the nearer layers of the Outside I am already frightened and dissolving.

I don't want to know what will happen if I go any deeper. I suspect I would never come back.

The wind howls. It resonates through me, sets ringing my knowledge that the Outside isn't finished with me, and so I screw my eyes shut and press my earplugs in further. It doesn't do any good.

* * *

## 6

I wanted to be prepared, is what it was. I wanted to continue developing my magic outside the Game when I left it, and maybe part of that was just plain greediness but part of it was definitely reasonable. You don't know what life is going to give you. None of us do. And while some people are content to rely on their hope that things will turn out well -

I don't have that hope. My father taught me to keep an emergency kit within reach at all times. What I learned was that I needed to know what I had and keep an eye out for everything I could use. I'm like one of those game protagonists that fills their inventory with everything that could be even remotely useful, from an aluminum can to a Zippo. I'm always seeking out more and more to build a bulwark between me and the things that could kill me.

But... come to think of it, maybe that's why the Bleak Academy didn't manage to finish the job. I went there seeking something that would protect me from nonexistence, even though I phrased the question in terms of power. The power was a means to an end, not an end in itself. I didn't want to rule. I wanted to survive.

I mean, all they had to offer was nonexistence. But they wrapped that up in words that didn't say what they really meant, too, and so neither of us actually understood what we were getting into.

They told me that there were others, like me, there. That they'd been successful in developing the powers of people from the Game. And that they thought they'd be able to develop mine, too.

This was all true, strictly speaking. They _did_ manage to help me develop my powers, but not in the way they intended to do it.

* * *

## 7

There's a shop a mile or so away from here, an old woman who carves pendants out of wood and strings them onto thick leather cords or thin silver chains. Phillip dragged me there once, or more properly told me he wanted something from it and he had the pocket money and I ended up carrying him on my shoulders half the way.

Phillip said, with all the seriousness that a seven-year-old boy could muster, that he didn't know when my birthday was but that I should have a birthday present because _everyone_ should have birthday presents, and offered the woman a few coins. The old woman smiled, and closed Phillip's hand back on the coins, and told me I could pick anything I wanted --

"But it wouldn't be fair," I said, "it would be like stealing your time."

The old woman almost-smiled, and said that even if I didn't accept _her_ generosity I should at least accept _his_ , and that the approval of a little child was enough payment for her. And then she started pulling out these drawers from under the counter with even _more_ necklaces and keychains and zipper tags, nestled on beds of dried moss. That's when I saw the spirograph.

The old woman must've noticed me staring at it, because she told me that she'd seen it on something one of her daughters brought back from a shop in Arcadia, and she'd spent _days_ trying to make it come out right. What, exactly, did her daughters bring back, I asked, and she said it was an envelope with one of those music disk things inside it.

I asked in a rush whether anyone in her house had put it in a computer, and she laughed and said that they didn't even have a CD player in their house, her daughter actually tried to buy the envelope without the CD and the shopkeeper wouldn't let her. To them it was just a nice piece of art that they'd already put in a frame and hung on the wall.

I told the old woman that I'd accept her generosity and take the spirograph if she destroyed the CD. She looked at me a bit strangely for a moment, but then asked me if snapping it into four pieces and burying it in their garden would suffice. It would, I said; and that is how I got the spirograph necklace. I wasn't going to wear it, but then I saw it on my dresser a few days after and started wearing it anyway. I did promise to accept the old woman's generosity, after all.

* * *

## 8

At the Methodology building they gave me something that was the size and shape of a credit card, made of clear plastic. It was my ID card, they said, and that if I walked through the Outside with it on my person it would make sure I got to the gates of the Bleak Academy, rather than getting lost in the eddies and currents of the void.

I wasn't really sure how a piece of clear plastic could serve as an ID card. Magic, probably. Honestly, nobody actually checked it once I got there. It's clear that nobody would go through the Outside to the Bleak Academy for any reason other than wanting to study there, so they just leave the cafeterias and buildings open. No point in locking any of the doors, either; someone might respond to a locked door by destroying the lock, the door, and probably the entire room beyond in a fit of pique. It's that kind of place.

(To be fair, they had dormitories, and _those_ doors had locks, but they used the kind of lock you could pick with a nail file, so I don't think that counts.)

They didn't really have classes so much as suggestions for lectures you could show up at, because - again - this wasn't the kind of place you went to unless you actually wanted to go there, so there was no point enforcing the dropping out of lower-quality students. If you were that low quality you'd probably end up being used as someone else's science experiment or art project anyway, so this was a problem that took care of itself, as it were.

The pamphlets said that you'd meet with one of their advisors first so that you could work out a program of study, insofar as programs of study exist there. The introductory courses, they said, were more like tutorials, and tailored to each student's strengths and weaknesses.

Well, they _were_.

I met the Professor, then, and that is when he told me that this would involve breaking me. That it was okay because they broke _everyone_. But he said that he warned me first because I'd recognize what the breaking felt like, from having been broken before. That I'd recognize my sense of self dissolving and think it was a bad thing. That I'd probably instinctively resist it, because most people resist - but people who have been broken before resist more, know the strategies for _not_ breaking under such conditions. That all these reactions were expected, and natural. They understood such things and would accommodate them.

He said people from existence often harbored such things - strategies for survival in one environment that were completely useless in another. I understood perfectly. I'd read about that, after all.

* * *

## 9

There was a game my father used to play with me, back when I was young, too young for camping. We would take turns pointing at things, and giving their names. He knew all the real names of things, but I was young then and didn't know them, so I made some up. Bark carpet, tree plates, dry soup. I assume he thought it was cute, and I also assume he did correct me eventually because I know perfectly well they're called mulch, fungus, and pasta salad now.

But I remembered that game, when I was lost in the Outside. I pointed - or sent my attention, in a pointing manner, because I wasn't entirely sure that I had hands - in the direction that I thought was down. "Ground," I said - and it seemed more stable. "Sky," I said, and pointed up, and there was a faint blueness in that direction. Maybe I was imagining them. I wasn't sure.

I kept going anyway. "Tree," I said, because I'd walked into something that might've been brown and vertical.

I didn't know which direction to point to indicate where the sun was. I knew that was something that was supposed to be in the sky, and I knew that it was _usually_ in the up direction, but there was just this _missingness_. I didn't know if there was such a thing anymore - I remembered vaguely that it'd _died_ , maybe that was why it wasn't here - so I didn't try.

After an interminably long time, there was something green, and I named the grass, and there was something brownish-gray, and I named the road.

And then I was running out of things to name, except for one - "Danielle," I said, pointing to myself, but that didn't achieve anything except making reality wobble a little.

I still wake up sometimes with my index finger pressed to my chest.

* * *

## 10

I agree with the Bleak Academy on very little, but I do agree with them on this point: there is something _wrong_ with the world as it is. Things are not supposed to be this way.

I don't know how they're supposed to be instead, is the problem. What is the use of trying to make the world fairer all by myself? Then again I could ask the same of them: what is the use of _them_ trying to make the world fairer by themselves?

And even my answer is the same as theirs: it is hopeless and I have to try anyway.

If I didn't try, my life would be worthless.

* * *

## 11

Death who is called Headmaster of the Bleak Academy, he did not take special notice of me, when I was there. He knew how my studies were going, of course, in the same way that he knew of everyone else's, and had been told that my tutorial wasn't going well. And so he walked with me, and talked to me of - 

He talked to me about instincts stronger than life, about those who would cling to their principles even if the world itself fell apart and went lifeless and gray, about things written into you on a deeper level than your desires and joys and sorrows. "If you ever wish help with such things, that can be - " he snapped his fingers - "arranged."

They shut one of the girls with the Jotun blood, the one that lived down the hall in my dormitory, into an iron cage for three days and three nights and when she came out she was burnt and sobbing and a heap but iron never troubled her again.

They took one of the older students, one I'd seen tinkering with a mechanical gryphon in the courtyard, and they strapped him down and twisted one of his favorite creations and had it cut out his heart, but thereafter he did not protect his creations with his life.

I was only going through the ordinary part of the tutorial, the one where they kept you awake for days and nights and asked you questions until they caught you in a contradiction. It was not going well because I was resistant to such things, and the Headmaster told me that it would be difficult to give me an extraordinary trial because my case was so strange but that they were sure they would come up with something eventually.

I looked into his eyes, and saw there the stars that I'd seen, back when my session was disintegrating; the ones that were really horrorterror eyes.

I told him that they could try such a thing, if they found it.

He nodded, then, and said no more, and left me there, and I stared up at the sky.

* * *

## 12

Yesterday there was a storm.

Today there is a world washed out by rain, smelling fresh and new and clean, and the day is hot, in a kind of buzzy, damp, heavy way. It is humid here; but the heat is at least a novel problem for me. It's better than the cold. At least this way I don't have to carry a backpack, and a sleeping bag. I can fold a tarp, for sleeping under, into the bottom of my purse and it is enough to make me feel safe. I know nobody will ever whisk me away on a camping trip again, but it still feels better to have everything on me.

At least the things I carry are useful, for purposes other than the ones that they were designed for. The tarp has a cord sewn through it so that I can wear it in the rain.

Today there is Phillip, in front of me, squirming as I explain to him that there really isn't any way for him to get around doing his math homework, and anyway when he's done I will show him something special.

It's only a pocketknife, a simple one with only a few tools on it, not nearly as durable as the one I keep belted to my hip, but it gives him joy, and it helps reassure me. The things he faces are totally different from the things I face, and the most he'll probably ever use it for is whittling wood or cleaning under his fingernails, but I want him to have something like that anyway. In case something happens.

* * *

## 13

They did find someone who they thought would be able to break me down, eventually.

They had other people from Sburb, there - not many, you understand, and the one possessed of the Heart magic had left a year ago to walk the Outside - but there were a few, even though I'd never seen so much as an Aspect symbol around. 

He was - I still do not know this name, to this day, and he wore a mask, so I did not even know what he looked like - he was a Rage player, possessed of the Word. I'd had a Rage player in my session, and I knew he was nobody I'd ever known, least of all the Maid of Rage I'd brought up.

They had other people, from other sessions, here, then.

He was apologetic, when they brought him in. He said he understood how hard it was for me, it was hard for _him_ , and then he took a deep breath and roared words into me. I cannot remember what he said, but I suspect that if you took off the top of my head, opened my skull like a softboiled egg, you'd see his words there in the folds of my brain matter. 

They let me sleep, after that.

* * *

## 14

I saw a solar eclipse once. Not a full one, you understand - those are too rare - but part of one.

I'd read that you could not look at the sun, even during an eclipse, because it would burn your eyes out if you looked too long. I'd read that you could see the shape of the sun safely, by poking a pinhole in a piece of paper and holding it between a second piece of paper and the sun, and the image of the sun on the paper would be enough of a shadow of a real thing that it would be safe to look at.

So I found a needle, from inside my survival kit, and dug out my pack of playing cards, and pierced a hole in one and held it above the other. The sun was whole and round, then; it wasn't the right day and time. A little, whole, round dot of sunlight sat on the five of hearts. I moved the cards closer to each other, further, and then put them away.

But it was time for a solar eclipse, only a few weeks after that, and I found the playing card with the pinhole in it and I held a second one under it for a screen, like I'd practiced before. The shadow-that-was-made-of-sunlight waned, became a crescent, as I watched.

For a moment I wasn't sure which one was the real shadow - the shadow of the sun, made of light, or the shadow of the moon, made of darkness.

And then reality reasserted itself, as it always did.

* * *

## 15

He couldn't break me either.

He tried - they kept trying - but the words, though they thundered into and through me, though they made impressions on me, they faded within a few days.

I kept getting within reach of the enlightenment the Bleak Academy promised, and slipping back.

I don't know why I'm alive.

I don't know why I'm here.

I don't know why I'm whole.

Because by all rights that should've _worked_.

I think, now that I have some distance, that it was my heart, and my father's training. I couldn't give up. I didn't know _how_.

* * *

## 16

The Headmaster came to me, then, again, and walked with me again. He looked intently at me and told me that if I _couldn't_ be broken by their ordinary means, that they would simply have to unmake part of me, turn me into a remote-controlled automaton, make my powers useful even if my mind could not be turned to their ways. That this was the best kindness they could offer, because otherwise they'd have to imprison me here, where I could do nothing to help them unmake the world.

And that is when it all burst open, like a dam, and when I knew it could not go on, and I told him -

Told him that there is a coldness in the heart of the aspect of Mind, and that is what brought me here. Logic, sterile logic in its symbolic and incomprehensible glory, knows nothing of the ends you use it to seek; it applies equally to good and evil; it cares only for purity and quickness of thought; it cannot be bent by mortal whim.

But there, equally, is a heart of warmth in that coldness. You cannot base logic on itself; you must first assume at least one principle exists, before you can derive any meaningful structure from it. Mathematics must be based on axioms; computers must have an input and an output channel. If you did not have principles then you may as well have been playing with your words, like a treadmill: perhaps useful for building your strength, and for showing off to others, but not all that useful for much else.

And I knew what their principles were, and they were not the same as mine, and there was nothing any amount of logic could do to that.

He turned on me, then, and looked at me with those eyes full of more eyes, and raised his fingers to snap -

but by then I'd dived back through the gates of the Bleak Academy, and was running for my life; and he'd acted a moment too late.

* * *

## 17

In the end the Outside couldn't break me either, though it tried its best, and though I wandered it alone and lost and thirsty for months I did eventually manage to make my way back to the parts that were more sane, where one could be _merely_ lost and frightened in the ordinary way, and from there to Town, where I assume I collapsed.

When I came to I told Anya that I'd vaguely known someone she was related to, and so she took me in, and that is why I tutor her orphaned nephew now.

I told her that I'd been in the Outside so long that my memory was falling apart, that I didn't tell her about my past because I had no past to tell her about. People wandered into Town like that, sometimes, so this was entirely plausible. It was a lie, but she didn't push. She didn't know there was anything to push for.

I make dozens of dreamcatchers and hang them all around my room, because they are supposed to keep the Outside from blowing through and into my dreams, and I stack them all up and bring them to the nearby temple for cleaning, once a week. The Hayashis must think me a madwoman, with my bag full of dreamcatchers, barely even soiled because I hang them so thickly. I even keep one with me at all times, for if I need to sleep outside, though I've never had to use it.

It doesn't do any good.

Nobody wakes me from my nightmares because they sleep on the other end of the house.

* * *

## 18

I wonder what would've happened, if the Headmaster had managed to work his magics; possibly he'd have teleported my heart into his hands, or he'd have snapped tethers onto my arms and legs, and pulled them apart, or he'd have put blinders over my eyes, so that I would see only what he wanted me to see, or he'd have filled me with hatred until I popped like a balloon.

It is why I think, sometimes, that my eyes should've been filled with the stars, then, eyes made of stars that were eyes. That he was about to turn me into one of them. That this is not how the world should be. That Danielle Wattson, Guide of Mind, is not supposed to exist anymore.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to die, but I can never bring myself to actually try. I suspect it wouldn't work, anyway. Suicide is neither heroic nor just.

Life is unfair and pointless like that.

I cling to this mortal world not because I choose to, but because I can't bring myself to relax my grip even for a second. They would have broken my fingers to get me free of this world, in the metaphorical sense of course, and I cringed away from that. But I do not know how to let go.

There are small joys here, of course. Sunlight and warmth and small children who learn quickly. There are things worth not letting go of.

But I wish, I _wish_ , that I could let go, and fall.

I wonder what it would be like, to fall through that endless void full of stars and eyes, forever.


	2. Dreams of the Headmaster

## 1

He didn't sneak in through the window, as I'd feared. He came through the door, opening and shutting it using the doorknob like a normal person.

"Danielle," the Headmaster said, quietly, as I started out of bed.

I said nothing.

"I am very disappointed in you," the Headmaster said. "You have not lived up to the potential I saw in you."

I said nothing.

"Why do you still resist? I _do_ want to know." He withdrew his knobbled, clawlike hand from his pocket; looked at it appraisingly, I think, although you cannot be certain of such things with those of the Rider eyes.

I said nothing.

Abruptly he thrust his hand at speed towards my chest -

* * *

## 2

It's a different thing he tries, each time this dream happens.

It is wearying, as of late; what does he - I am not sure if he is the real Headmaster of the Bleak Academy or a figure in my dreams - want to do with me? Is he toying with me? Why am I resisting? Why can't I stop?

I know how to win. I don't know how to lose.

* * *

## 3

The other day, I met a strange young woman, my age, prowling across the roofs of the houses. I shimmied up a drainpipe and accosted her.

She told me she was looking for something dangerous. Something that I shouldn't tangle with.

"When the Outside storms come in," she said, "do not go outside."

My response was something like _duh, why would you_ \- but she continued:

"Typhon will eat you, if she gets the chance, and I do not wish for you to come to harm."

Obviously my response was to go visit one of the bars, the one where the rats apparently had all the best rumors, and inquire as to this "Typhon" figure.

A great, golden snake representing unexamined privilege. Right. I've killed a giant snake before. It was called my Denizen. How hard could it be to do it again?

That's when the rooftop-girl staggered in, clutching a deep wound on her arm.

* * *

## 4

Phillip was waiting for me, when I got back home. He said I had those lines around my mouth that people get when they're worried about something.

I lied, earlier, but only a little bit, when I said that Anya was the one who took me in. Phillip was the one who did most of the convincing. I just recited about fifteen lines of the Odyssey, really. He says that I looked like I needed someone to stay with. The Rybakov family compound isn't a big one - Aunt Anya, as Phillip calls her, had to wheedle a room off someone else to fit me in - but it's also the kind of place where I wouldn't be that much of a burden or a mouth to feed, assuming I pitched in for the odd gutter-cleaning. So I stayed.

Anya knows me as quiet, mysterious, but extremely academically skilled and thus at least an acceptable tutor for Phillip, assuming he had been raised properly by his late parents. Phillip knows me as someone who'll humor even his most ridiculous schemes, someone who needs to be wheedled into accepting anything for myself, and someone who went on Adventures, once.

I'd told him little bits of the story now and then, when he'd done especially well on a test - things about what it felt like to stand on the Promontory, dreaming on the kingdom of Derse and the little streets and alleyways there, being the Consorts' gofer, the antics my coplayers had gotten into.

I wasn't planning on telling him the whole story. But "the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy is after me" just slipped out of my mouth.

He stared at me, wide-eyed.

Then of course I had to tell the rest of the story, to properly contextualize the statement. So I kept talking.

* * *

## 5

The Headmaster - the one in my dreams - he showed up again, that night.

I tried to respond to him, but the words would not come out of my mouth.

I tried to defend against him, but my thoughts were inexorably drawn towards his words like iron fillings to a magnet.

I tried to dodge that hand of his - and that was when I woke up, that's when I always wake up, but this time I'd managed to physically jerk myself half off the bed and found my covers lying on the floor, and the air had an unseasonable chill, as if it was January, and not September.

I went back to sleep, afterwards.

Early the next morning Anya woke me, and told me that Phillip was gone.

* * *

## 6

There's not much I remember my father telling me, about finding people who are lost. There's probably traditions. Perhaps I'm supposed to leave bread out for them, or tie a braid around my ankle, or something.

But I said I was going to go look for Phillip, and proceeded to get thoroughly lost. To be honest, I wasn't looking for him. I was looking for someplace I could sit, and think to myself.

Then I looked up, and saw a set of stairs, yellow and sturdy, and beyond them a jungle.

Town, I knew, was larger than Fortitude; but because you usually had to walk a couple hours to get beyond its limits, you'd have to make a dedicated trip of it if you wanted to go to a different Region. And I hadn't bothered, but if there was a place like this here -

(When I saw that there were buildings over which the forest had grown I revised my expectations down from "I want to live here" to "I should probably visit sometimes".)

After a time, I found my way to a door that seemed new, though it was set into a building grown with ivy.

I knocked. A robot answered the door.

* * *

## 7

Alvin RIMM was quick to correct me on my terminology ("I'm an _automaton_ , not a _robot_ "), but soon enough left me on a fraying couch with instructions that his master would meet me shortly.

The master in question turned out to be a young man with uncombed hair; he walked backwards into the front room, muttering loudly: "Now if you're here for a social visit this isn't the time I'm trying to get this calibration done before the Boat Star shows -" 

Then he looked at me. I straightened the hem of my shirt nervously.

"You must be from Fortitude, that style isn't popular in the other regions. No, no, there isn't enough time for you to get back down there, you wouldn't reach Net Street until past midnight and that's when the vampires are out -"

" _Vampires!?_ "

"You're also relatively new to Town, judging by the fact that you've left your shirt unbanded despite the predominant fashion, the katawards bent of your bearing, the wear pattern on your shoes, and the temperature of your dismay, as well as the fact that you -"

"Look. Aunt Anya'll miss me if I'm not there and if I really can't get back before midnight I should at least let her know I haven't disappeared into thin air, because my student disappeared this morning."

"And I shall thusly save the day with the Radio Semaphore Machine, a duplicate of which I have dutifully installed in the third-floor window of the Archive to facilitate my investigations! What did you say your aunt's name was -"

It went on like this for a while.

* * *

## 8

His name was The Incomparable Leonardo de Montreal! (Apparently the epithet and the exclamation point were both part of his full name. I didn't ask.) Leonardo, as everyone else calls him, turned out to be an inventor of... machines. Oddly organic machines. Then he clarified that they were machines constructed out of parts of nightmares, rather than just machines that looked like nightmares, nightmare technology was like that -

I put a hand up in front of him. "You say you're good with nightmares?"

"Oh but I am The Incomparable Leonardo de Montreal! Nightmares are my clay and with them I sculpt vast edifices of things beyond human understanding, things crafted out of the flesh of impossibility and the claws of the undefeatable and the eyes of -"

"Say I had nightmares about the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy."

All the color drained out of his face.

* * *

## 9

He sat down, heavily, next to a metal case with a porthole that displayed a... disembodied beating heart. Weird. "Nightmares, you say."

"At least I think they're nightmares," I clarified. "I'm not entirely sure how to rule out whether it's actual influence from him."

"I do have a monitoring device that I think would be useful, one to detect the emanations of dreams and tease out the subtle paths that separate your dreams from those of others; but you'd have to sleep inside it."

"Inside what?"

He leaned out and pulled a sheet off what looked like a section of intestine.

I squinted at it. "May I touch it?" Permission granted, I tapped on it. It seemed solid. The aperture opened and closed easily. The insides felt... surprisingly padded and comfortable. There was even an attachment on the side that looked like an alarm clock had been shoved through the walls. (I later learned that this was because an alarm clock actually had been shoved through the walls.)

"It is technically functional right now, but I haven't finished surfacing the -"

"I'll take it."

* * *

## 10

The dream started out slowly - I was in my room, not in the dream-machine, I was listening to footsteps, the footsteps came closer and closer -

But when the door opened there was nothing there.

I creeped out of bed, then; picked up and switched on a flashlight, experimentally; walked outside. The world beyond was a dreamscape of ruin. Blood and fire spread across the sky; I spotted Leonardo's figure on the cracked ground. I called out to him. He looked up, straight at me - and then vanished.

Suddenly I wasn't in the nightmare world. Suddenly I was the size of a bug, standing on the Headmaster's palm; he smiled, and clapped his hands together, another wall of pale flesh closing to meet me from above -

and I woke up screaming.

* * *

## 11

He didn't come down the entire morning; I was about to take the stairs to see if I could find him on the roof, invitations be damned, when Alvin RIMM found me. Apparently Leonardo wished to inform me that while I was not supposed to have seen that, it was a bit late for that now, and would I please meet him on the eighth-floor balcony?

"Certainly," I said. Alvin RIMM made a mechanical noise for a long moment, then provided directions. I thanked the mechanical butler. He bowed.

I found Leonardo with his feet threaded under the balcony railing, sitting there, staring at the sun. I cleared my throat. He turned, offering me a basket of berries. He looked _nervous_. Nothing like the mad scientist I'd seen last night, except in the shape of his features, and even they seemed - softened, here.

Both of us stared out at the world for a long time. I leaned against the railing, and popped a few berries into my mouth. They were tart. Novel. Made a surprisingly good brunch, even though I didn't recognize them.

Finally, he leaned back, and spoke. "I also have history with the Headmaster."

"I went there of my own will," I said. "That makes it my own damn fault."

He laughed, harshly. "Do you really think that The Incomparable Leonardo de Montreal! did not know what he was getting into when he decided to strike out into the Outside? I knew perfectly well what I was seeking and I knew perfectly well what price I was going to pay for it. Doesn't mean it hurt any less when it was ripped out of me."

I closed my eyes. Felt the sun on my face. "I keep thinking - he was going to fill my eyes with the night and the falling stars. When I left, I honestly thought I was going to be trapped in the Outside forever. Even now, the storms want me back. I keep imagining that _he_ wants me back, too. So I don't know where to go."

"You could stay around here, you know. If he comes for you I could hold him off, or at least distract him. And the storms don't usually come this far inland, and even if they _did_ I have plans for an extended dreamcatcher-net that'd filter the Outside out of even the greatest of storms..."

"I couldn't. I need to be there for Phillip, if he comes back. And Anya, if he doesn't."

"So you've already made your choice."

"I have?" I did a double-take. "Oh."

* * *

## 12

I found the rooftop-girl slumped across the path between Fortitude and Old Molder.

She was asleep, I think, despite it being broad daylight. I listened, for a moment - she was muttering something about "I'll scrub it until it shines like the midnight sun sir yes sir please sir" - and made obvious noise, to wake her up.

She was instantly awake and I think the only thing that prevented her from rousing to attack mode was sheer exhaustion.

"...Sorry," she offered.

The bees visiting the roadside berry bushes buzzed, under the hot noonday sun.

"So, uh... fancy seeing you again?" She was making as if to scratch her neck nervously but the bandage around her arm was in her way. Finally she gave up and just sat there.

"...do you need help getting back?"

"You're not going to let me turn it down, are you," she groused good-naturedly, as I hauled her arm up around my shoulders.

* * *

## 12

I am pretty certain that either Aunt Anya did not expect for me to be showing up with a Koutolika over my shoulder, or she thought I'd shapeshifted Phillip into an older girl. (For the record, I can do no such thing.)

To her credit, she recovered quickly, let the roof-girl lie down on a window seat, and sent one of the loitering cousins off to fetch one Lenya Koutolika. "Danielle, where did you get her?"

I explained that I'd seen her on the path, and that before that I'd seen her on the roofs - though I tactfully failed to mention exactly what she was _doing_ up there. Anya sighed, wiped her forehead with her sleeve, and asked roofgirl if she'd gotten that bite "looked at".

She closed her eyes. "I could tell it wasn't life-threatening, so it slipped my mind."

Anya fairly exploded at the notion that something that would leave someone incapacitated in the middle of the road wasn't "life-threatening" and bustled off, presumably to make several other calls.

* * *

## 13

"I never did get your name," I commented, pouring myself some iced tea and offering her a glass.

"Natalia," she said. Then she drank the entire glass of iced tea, while still horizontal, without spilling a drop.

"This must feel so undignified." I stared into the iced tea.

"I've had worse," She grimaced. "My parents are usually pretty forgiving of this kind of thing but they'll want to know what on earth possessed me."

"Say it was my fault," I suggested.

"Lies are inefficient, because after that you will need to remember two different versions of the truth for a long time." A sigh. "Goddamned snakes."

"Yeah."

She didn't ask me why I was coming back from Old Molder, so I didn't ask her why she looked like she was going there.

* * *

## 14

The... semaphore-gram?... from Leonardo came in about two hours later.

> ANALYSIS COMPLETE
> 
> PROBABILITY 67 PER CENT
> 
> CONSULT FOR MORE DETAILS

That was, unfortunately, about as much information as I already had. I dashed off a quick reply - would revisiting the dream machine afford more accuracy? - and gave it to the kid who'd run the message over, plus a few coins and a glass of iced tea for her trouble.

"News about Phillip?" asked Anya.

I shook my head.

"Damn," she said. "I'd be out there looking, but I'd just get myself lost. Someone says they heard the Angel of Fortitude's motorcycle around here, and the sound of a scuffle, this morning. I don't know where to follow up. But idle hands make for idle thoughts."

Anya pulled out a cutting board and began cleaning a fish. I pondered this, for a moment, and then decided to help.


	3. Spirograph Pendant

## 1

I wandered the streets of Fortitude at dusk, that evening; having told Anya that I wanted to keep looking for Phillip, I had no idea where to start but figured I should put my back into it.

I stopped for a bite to eat from a restaurant I didn't recognize, thinking I'd get something cheap and then keep looking, and the proprietress shot a meaningful look at my spirograph pendant and waved me into the back.

Her name was Joyce. She'd been in Fortitude for seven years now.

Then she poked her head out to look around, closed the door to the little office where we were talking, and told me that she was a Maid of Space.

Unfortunately my first, reflexive response was "Wait, so you're made of space?"

She laughed long and loud.

* * *

## 2

She leaned back behind the desk and retrieved a photo album; flipped through it.

Pictures. Another session of Sburb, with different players but achingly familiar mechanics... and a picture of Skaia, gone dark and cloudless.

Since they couldn't finish without somewhere to put the Genesis Frog, Joyce and the others piled into a Prospitian battleship and went careening through the Ring until they splashed down. (Literally, in this case.) They emerged into a populace more used to seeing refugee boats that _weren't_ made of golden-tinted plastic, but strangely accepting of their... interesting life stories.

And then the second boat of Sburbians arrived.

And then the third.

* * *

## 3

When the sun died, so did Skaia. That's what Joyce said, anyway. "I don't know why they're related," she said; "only that they're related somehow, and that Jade Irinka had something to do with it."

Meanwhile, the Ring was not spared the boilover of the Outside, and the Horrorterrors started pushing through the cracks, to plop down in Big Lake as well. Desperately escaping the pool of the Outside that it'd turned into out there. They wanted to turn it back into nothing, because they were used to _nothing_ , not this... stuff.

The Bleak Academy, of course, was happy to assist.

In exchange, they agreed that the Horrorterrors would provide, on a yearly basis, a brace of Sburb players, powers intact.

"So is that why the Professor was grumbling about not having received 'this kind of kid' for the past two years - " I clamped my hands over my mouth.

Joyce was confused. Unfortunately, she was interrupted before she could clarify further by a knock on the door. She reached over and opened it.

It was Leonardo.

"What the hell are you doing here!?" said Joyce and I, in unison.

He ignored the question. "Danielle Wattson," Leonardo said, "you are a goddamned idiot."

* * *

## 4

There was silence.

"Leonardo de Montreal," I shot back, "you have no idea what is going on here."

"I don't need to. I just listened for the sound of secrets that have no reason to ever be exposed to open air." He turned to Joyce. "If you are going to lock your back door, do not hide the key under a false rock. Firstly, it's not even the same color as any of the other rocks back there, and secondly, it's the most obvious place to look. I'm surprised it took a genius such as me to point this out."

Joyce managed to recover herself: "You are trespassing. Get out. This is your only warning."

"Only if you two come with me."

Joyce ran a hand through her hair in frustration, closed her eyes, and then we weren't _there_ anymore. We were on the roofs, somewhere. Nowhere I recognized, anyway. A full moon rose in the night sky. The harvest moon.

" _Now_ can you explain?" I demanded, once I'd regained my footing.

Leonardo narrowed his eyes. "You have _no idea_ what kind of forces you're meddling in here."

"Actually, I do," said Joyce. "Our kind are trained by a game to assume godlike powers. And the Bleak Academy hasn't gotten its tithe of us for two years now."

There was a streak of light, close to the horizon. "Meteor," Joyce and I chorused in unison, and then looked at each other. Different Sburb sessions. Same habits. It was oddly comforting.

And then there was another, and another.

Suddenly the sky was starless, the streetlamps below providing the only illumination; and the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy strolled up to us, with his thumbs hooked into his pockets.

* * *

## 5

I cursed, under my breath, and felt for my strife specibus. Crossbowkind isn't great at short range, but that's what pocketknifekind is for -

"Oh, there'll be no need for that," said the Headmaster. "I'm just here to chat."

Joyce said, "Oh."

I knew that she'd felt the same as I did: that the challenge was invigorating. At last here was something that could be solved in the ways Sburb had trained us to solve problems! And then the Headmaster said that this was just a chat, and that was that.

Leonardo was trying to slip away without being seen. The Headmaster reached out - "Leonardo! It's been so long; how has your workshop been going?" - and caught him on the shoulder. 

"We can catch up," said Leonardo. "How about we take a walk?" He began to try to move the Headmaster away from us.

The Headmaster caught the intent of the motion immediately, and demurred. "I'll catch up with you, Leonardo, after I speak with the ladies." And Leonardo just stood there, staring at the starless sky.

* * *

## 6

"I should probably let you know," he said to me, "that you should not have told your younger brother about your... understanding of the situation. Nevertheless, we're sending him back home, once we've finished making sure that he has been cleaned of all suspicious memories. Consider it a gift."

"He's not my younger brother," I said. "He's my student. And that's not how gifts work. You don't just take something from someone and then assume they'll be happy when you give it back."

"Consider it an act of grace, then, that I'm sending him back at all. But now that I'm talking to you, there _is_ something that you could help me with..."

"No," said I.

"At least hear me out. Maybe your companion here would be more amenable to the offer."

"I said no. Joyce, don't listen to him."

"My words are not binding. You are free to turn me down after I've spoken."

"Headmaster," I said, "it is usually considered polite to stop talking when other people tell you to stop talking."

"I can see I'm not welcome," the Headmaster said, mildly. "Word is that your ward will be ready in about six hours."

The stars flickered back on in the sky, and the Headmaster - and Leonardo - were gone.

* * *

## 7

"What the hell was that?" Joyce said.

I lay there on the roof, staring up at the stars. "I have no clue."

She shuddered. "It was creepy. His _eyes_."

"Those are kind of hard to get used to, yeah."

"Why'd he show up?"

I rolled over, and looked at her. "He apparently doesn't want the story of how he failed to convert me being spread around."

She looked back at me. "Well, that explains a few things. I wonder what he was asking us for, though."

"I don't know," I answered, entirely truthfully. "We should be getting back. I need to tell Anya. Speaking of which, where are we?"

"I teleported us this far so that guy would have a difficult time finding my place again if we needed to ditch him, but... evidently that isn't a concern anymore, and I don't quite have enough juice to get back. Not tonight, anyway." Joyce frowned. "Maybe we should ask someone around here if we could stay for the night."

She vaulted off the roof. I followed.

* * *

## 8

Something with a headlight pulled onto the road behind us. Joyce and I turned.

"Need a ride?" There was a man, and a motorcycle, and a motorcycle trailer (where do you even _get_ those) with a bit of sawdust still in the corners.

"Um... yes, actually," I said. "Who are you?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, at the same time Joyce whispered, "The Angel of Fortitude." I'd heard that name before, although I wouldn't put two and two together until I wasn't tired, which wouldn't be that night.

He said, "You looked like you were pretty far from home. I'm not going to make either of you ride with me on the bike itself, but it might be a tight fit in the trailer if you don't."

"Yeah," said Joyce. "I'll ride in the front. I actually run a restaurant down near the west docks." I nodded, and climbed into the trailer.

The mysterious motorcycle man whistled. "That's three hours' walk. How'd you get out here?"

"Long story," I said.

I was thankful for the fact that he did not ask for any elaboration.

* * *

## 9

He dropped us off at our respective destinations, said he'd find us if we ever needed that again (how, precisely? Eh, whatever, I've seen plenty of people who can work magic living here). Joyce offered to serve him if he ever showed up at the restaurant. I didn't have anything like that to offer, but he waved away the notion that I'd need to pay him. "Service is its own reward," he said. Then I asked how much the gas for his bike cost, imported, and he let me shove some coins at him.

I stumbled into the Rybakov compound, quite ready to just tell Anya the good (?) news and then drop onto my bed.

Anya was slumped over the kitchen table, asleep. I shook her gently. "I found where Phillip got off to," I said. "Once they fix him up he'll be back. Probably before dawn."

"Thank the sun," she said, blearily. "You should go to sleep. I'll get the cousins to stay up."

I made it to my bed and fell over. The sleep was, for once, dreamless.


	4. Diary

## 1

The relatives were very concerned about Phillip’s apparent memory loss, and fussed over him protectively for the next few days. I caught up on my sleep and tried not to think about falling stars, mostly successfully.

The day Phillip was finally packed back off to school, I received a Leonardogram. Again, I paid the kid who’d delivered it - Mimi, her name was? Something like that - and unfolded the message. “No response this time,” I told her. “Seeing as he’s asking me to meet him.”

“He must really like you,” Mimi said, earnestly.

I laughed. “No, nothing of the sort. We’re…” I searched for the right word. “Colleagues? Something like that. Anyway, if you need somewhere to spend your coins, the bubble tea down the street’s amazing.”

The kid scampered off. I told Anya I’d be staying over in Old Molder again. She packed me some bread and cheese that she said were good with the berries there.

* * *

## 2

“Come in,” said Leonardo, who was wearing… something that was _moving_. In response to my questioning glance, he elaborated: “I’m trying out a laboratory coat made of skins flayed off live nightmare beasts. It probably won’t reach out and envelop you. Probably.”

“Won’t the rest of the nightmare beasts come and want their skins back?” I asked, to take my mind off the notion that the laboratory coat seemed certain to reach out and envelop me.

He laughed. Cackled, really. “I made them _like_ having their skin torn off.”

I involuntarily took a step back.

“Of course, you’re here for something other than my glorious explanations of my fantastical science, so…”

* * *

## 3

We had tea (brewed in a furry self-warming teapot with eyes). I set out the bread and cheese. He dipped his head in thanks; we nibbled.

“So,” I said, finally, “what did you summon me for?”

“The Headmaster of the Bleak Academy would like to cordially invite you to assist in figuring out what the hell the holdup is with the Horrorterrors. He would have one of the others do it, but they’re either not where he can reach them or too important at the Bleak Academy.”

“So what’s your opinion, the one that isn’t the Headmaster’s? What would you have me do?”

“I would advise you to turn him down, but…”

He closed his eyes and unbuttoned his shirt. There was a hole in his chest, where his heart should’ve been. Inside it shone blood and fire.

* * *

## 4

I still don’t know why I’m telling you this story. I mean, they say keeping a diary helps with this kind of thing - lets you set out your memories flat so that you can remember them rather than reconstructing them every time they come to mind - but I’m not sure it isn’t hopeless.

Maybe I shouldn’t try to heal the gash the Headmaster left in my soul, because if I try then he’ll come back and make it wider.

Maybe it’s impossible to heal; maybe hearts tear like paper rather than separate like dough.

But one of the Hayashis said to me that writing was another thing I could do for nightmares instead of the dreamcatchers - not that they didn’t appreciate my care in making sure to hang up all those dreamcatchers and clean them on a regular basis, but you only need one for every three hundred square feet or one person (whichever is greater), and they figured that I shouldn’t have to do quite so much work.

Eventually I let them take some of my dreamcatchers, and hung up only half of what I’d had before. (Which was still a lot more than one for every three hundred square feet or one person, whichever is greater, but I wasn’t going to whittle down quite that close.)

There’s no perceptible difference in how much Outside dust they catch.

I’m afraid they still think I’m a madwoman.

* * *

## 5

I stared at Leonardo’s empty chest.

I stared at it until Alvin RIMM came whirring up with a tray of berries (the correct ones to pair with that particular cheese; evidently someone here had taste). So I ate, for lack of anything better to do, and to put off having to answer.

He began rebuttoning his shirt, eyes still closed.

Finally, I could stand the silence no longer. “And that’s… what he wants to do to me?”

“That’s what he _tried_ to do to you,” he corrected. “To make you into a shell of yourself, with his motivating force inside you rather than your own.”

I put my head in my hands. “And I’m supposed to avoid this fate by listening to him, which means that I will be following his will anyway. Is that really any better?”

“This way,” Leonardo de Montreal said, opening his eyes, “you’ll be able to keep your will in case you need it.”

“How?”

“For instance, I was the one who tore my own heart out.”

* * *

## 6

Apparently he’d taken it out to replace the sun, or to make it so that the sun didn’t _stay_ dead, or something. I didn’t really understand the details.

But if that’s how the sun un-died - if that’s the reason we now have a sun again - why isn’t he _celebrated_ , I ask?

Apparently, _apparently_ , he’d never told anyone, and would very much like for me not to tell anyone either. I would’ve disobeyed this and done it anyway, if it wasn’t for the experience I’d just had with Phillip.

In this world words had real power.

In this world I was defying the literal god of death and undoing.

I was suddenly reminded of the epic poetry of the Greeks. “Hubris,” I said to myself.

“It’s a bad thing,” Leonardo replied, just as I noticed that I said it aloud. “You’d best learn that before you get yourself killed.”

I would retort that I couldn’t get myself killed even when I wanted to, but those words didn’t come out of my mouth nearly so easily.

* * *

## 7

Time, Sburb; setting, the Denizen’s lair.

Mnemosyne’s body trailed out, down the hall, long past the pool of light the torches cast. Her head was in the spotlight; the rest of the snakelike, scaled form of my Denizen thus presented the effect of extending into infinite darkness. (Presumably there was an end to this hall. I did not look for it. I assumed that, like much of the rest of Sburb, it would probably kill me. My curiosity was not satisfied. My drive to not be dead, however, was.)

She had spoken to me for weeks and weeks and weeks before this. These were honest, raw conversations. We talked about my coplayers. We talked about my father. She was the one who prodded me to realize that the things my father did may have damaged me as much as they strengthened me.

On this particular occasion, she had told me that she could retroactively erase me from the world with a thought, and that killing me would be even easier.

“So why don’t you?” I said, unthinkingly. “If you have that kind of power I’ve never seen it.”

She stared at me. “Because I choose to spare you.”

“What the hell is there worth sparing?”

A long, slow blink from her, translucent membranes sliding across her eyes. “Your memories. Your experiences. Hideous as they may have been, there may be value to them later on.” Then she dismissed me.

Later on, I asked what she meant by that - I damned well didn’t see value from them within my session.

“Remember,” she said, “that I said ‘may be’. My time with you grows short. You will have to find that value yourself.”

So far I haven’t exactly had much success.

* * *

## 8

I slept inside the intestinal dream machine that night at Leonardo’s, of course, because it would be a shame not to get that data, considering I was already there. Interference from strange sources? Perhaps it could be triangulated, or the readings averaged, or something. (I know nothing of nightmare science; I’m making this up.)

I’d been free of the dreams of the Headmaster for a few days, but the discussion with Leonardo brought them on again with a vengeance. I woke twice that night with a raw throat.

It occured to me, the second time, that part of the reason the walls of the dream-measuring machine were so thick may have been to muffle screams.

* * *

## 9

I awoke that morning to toast with the rest of the berries and cheese next to it. The toast had cooled, but I ate it anyway.

Leonardo came down the stairs just as I was finishing up wiping up the last of the crumbs with the last chunk of cheese. “I’d ask you how you slept, but I already know. Here.” He shoved a long, curling strip of what seemed to be receipt-printing paper at me. “If you’re interested in the raw data.”

I looked at it. It was filled with numbers. I had no context for them. I said as much.

He sighed, then took it back from me. “The short version is: it says it’s all in your head.”

He was still wearing the nightmare-skin jacket. He looked like the kind of jittery-tired you get when you’ve just drunk your fifth cup of coffee and you’re hitting diminishing caffeine returns.

“Humor me for a moment. I’m going to guess,” I ventured, “that you also have nightmares, and they’re made of blood and fire, and they reach into other people’s dreams. And that to prevent interference from them last night, you decided to just not sleep the entire night.”

“Are you asking me to reveal my methods?”

“I’m asking you if you have even slept at all. Because if you haven’t, you should. You look like you need it.”

He looked as if he was going to wind himself up for another one of those ridiculous monologues. Then he decided not to bother, and told me to lock the door when I left, and trudged back up the stairs.

* * *

## 10

It was still early in the morning; I took a while to wander through Old Molder before I had to get back - partially to work out my feelings on the issue, and partially because I didn’t want to go back to Phillip, and Joyce, and all the threats of the Headmaster.

I found a ladder that led to rooftops, and bridges between them, and I wandered on those for a while.

The jungle was lush; it was October, and while the nights were getting cold the frosts had not quite yet set in.

I saw two men building out a latticework of steel and rivets from the side of one building to another. They nodded to me, but continued to work, joking with each other about Jotun winds.

I saw an ornithopter in the sky, glinting copper against the clouds.

I picked some edible broad leaves from a plant or two, rolled them up, and ate as I walked.

I thought about Sburb.

* * *

## 11

Why didn’t I go through the Door?

I mean, sure, I might not have liked my coplayers, but we’re talking about an entire universe here, and me plenty immortal enough to just fly out into airless space, if necessary.

But that was too safe. That was too easy. That was what Sburb wanted me to do.

I’m a Mind player. I want to make choices. Why should I be so surprised that I made a choice, even a stupid one?

Because maybe - just maybe - this was all meant to funnel me into Town.

Maybe this kind of occurence - people deciding, spontaneously, that they don’t want to go through the Door - is how the Horrorterrors funnel people out of Sburb into the Bleak Academy.

And all at once it hits me, now: if the Horrorterrors had just kidnapped two-by-twos and shoved them into the Bleak Academy without further preparation, they wouldn’t have been at all useful. It would be fulfilling the letter of the obligation, and not the spirit. The Bleak Academy can wring far more use out of someone who wholly believes them than out of someone like me, who can’t. What the Horrorterrors were asked to provide were _willing_ conspirators.

Here’s the question, then: if this is the case, why isn’t whatever they’re doing working anymore?

* * *

## 12

The door of the Koutolikas’ place, when I went there, was a sturdy one, carefully hewn and varnished wood with a brass knocker. I was there to check on her, I would say; but maybe there was something else calling me there.

“Sergey, keep away from the door,” I heard, and then there was Lenya Koutolika answering the door; she ushered me in, and before I could even get a word in edgewise she’d seated me at a table with a glass of iced tea in front of me.

“What’s all this for?” I asked Lenya, who’d slid into another chair. She frowned and fiddled with the ties holding the chair’s seat cushion down.

“So now that we’re settled,” she said, bringing her hands back up to the table and pouring herself another iced tea. “You helped Natalia, so we help you. Is there something you need?”

“I mostly just wanted to ask after how she was doing.”

“Well enough to sneak back out after a few days, apparently. She can handle herself, which doesn’t stop me from worrying. But such is a mother. When does a mother _not_ worry?”

“I wouldn’t know. I was adopted by my father.” I was not about to explain ectobiology to this woman, grateful to me or no.

She looked at me, carefully. “You have grown strong, but yet you are not lacking in the feminine.”

“I raised myself,” I said. “My mothers, I suppose, were in the books I read.”

“A woman with mothers in the pages, then?”

“I’m not a woman,” I said. “I haven’t earned adulthood. I refused it when it was offered to me.” I thought about the Door. I thought about what refusing it meant about me.

“That’s not something you need to earn. You already have it, or should I say, you’ve long since earned it.”

I blushed and looked down.

“You’re certainly strong enough for it,” said Lenya, “and I’m not talking about carrying someone over your shoulders.”

* * *

## 13

We sipped iced tea and looked through the front bay window for a while, at the street. There was someone who pedaled a tricycle, a wheeled cooler emblazoned with pictures of ice cream hitched behind him. There were a few takers; it was a warm day by October standards.

The back door opened, closed. There was a clattering in the kitchen. Lenya turned her head and hollered into the kitchen: “There’s potatoes on the stove.” The clattering stopped for a while, then resumed briefly; and when it stopped for the second time Natalia pushed open the swinging door to the room we were in, cradling a bowl of potatoes in her good arm.

“Hi,” she said, breathlessly, to no one in particular. “It’s done.”

“What’s done?” I said.

“Choked under her own weight,” Natalia said. “Left the spear in. I’ll have to retrieve it later, but I didn’t want to take it out in case she wasn’t dead.”

Lenya pulled out a chair and put a placemat down, then steered Natalia into the empty seat and sat her down.

“I talked to her about that time. In Russia. With the ski instructor.” Natalia stabbed a chunk of potato with her fork and put it in her mouth. Chewed furiously. Swallowed. Continued to babble. “And the other time, with Nikolai. And what happened with the supercomputer.”

I shot Lenya a look - _I have no idea either_ , her look said back to me - but didn’t say anything out loud.

“It’s done. I don’t know what to do now,” continued Natalia, and then she seemed to realize where she was. “Oh. Hi, Danielle. I don’t know what to do.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Neither do I.”

* * *

## 14

I sit on the rooftop, writing in this diary.

I listen to the wind, and the sounds it carries to me.

I realize it is beautiful, here. Fortitude isn’t beautiful in the way of the woodlands or the jungles, it isn’t the kind of place where you can hide away, but it’s got its own beauty. It’s a place that puts a sort of peace in your heart.

The cousins are playing some kind of kickball in the courtyard at the center of the house complex. Phillip is with them. He’s too little to be of much use, but he tries and the older ones humor him.

That would never have happened on Earth. Could never have happened. The way schools were on Earth would never have let something like this survive.

This is the kind of place that _lets_ people be carefree, lets them have faith that things will work out, lets them spare enough to care for others.

I don’t really understand it. But I guess it’s something, that a place like this exists.

* * *

## 15

I found Joyce, later that week. I needed to talk about this with someone, sort out what I think about Sburb. I babbled at her about how the Horrorterrors might’ve predestined people to choose to come here rather than go to their new universes.

She’d met a lot of ex-Sburb players, she said. A lot of them worked as sailors now, as adventurers sailing off through Big Lake in search of new and strange lands. She, with her restaurant, was really an exception. Most of them didn’t settle down. Many of them found, like me, that they couldn’t…

Joyce trailed off. “I don’t know how to explain this.”

I waited. She was folding dumplings, while she talked. I watched her crimp an edge with her fingers.

“I guess the best way to explain it,” she said, “is that they couldn’t have faith in this place. In what this place stands for.”

“No, that makes complete sense. This is the kind of place that fills you up with the idea that you can do good simple work, that you’ll have people to do it with, that you don’t need to spend your life skittering from disaster to disaster.” I paused; pulled out a spare piece of string and began idly tying Scout knots in it. “This place promises it, and as far as I can tell it delivers, but it still takes a lot to get past the feeling that it’s just lulling me into a false sense of security.”

“Yeah, I get that. For the first three years I would sooner have guessed that I’d stick my face in the Lake permanently than stay here.” Joyce scooped up some filling and flung it onto a dumpling wrapper with a sense of finality. “If you wash your hands, you can help me with the dumplings.”

* * *

## 16

“The plot of Sburb,” said Joyce once I’d gotten back from the sink, “is that Prospit _always_ loses. In every session. It’s destined to lose. We’re destined to avenge them. There’s never a case where they win. Ever.”

I frowned and carefully copied what Joyce was doing with her hands with the dumplings. “I wonder what that’s supposed to accomplish. Fatalism?”

“It’s built as a video game,” she said; “the demands of plot are put above the demands even of making us better people. A design choice that I hate, incidentally. But it gives you a biased view of what life is supposed to look like.”

I agreed, and placed my first lopsided dumpling next to Joyce’s neat ones.

“In real life, there’s no eleventh hour in which all is lost and you have to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Sometimes you just win. Sometimes you just lose. Often it isn’t under your control in the first place. I was all for the videogame plot of Sburb, but then - then, well, someone hollowed out Skaia by shooting down the sun, and I had to come here.”

She showed me how she held her fingers and pinched in folds to close up the dumplings. The next dumpling I made was less lumpy.

“But you know that already,” she said. “Prospit teaches you idealism. Derse teaches you realism.”

“As far as I’m concerned I have too much realism,” I said. “If this place is worth believing in I want to believe in it.”

She looked at me, bemusedly. “Grass being greener on the other side of the fence,” she chuckled to herself. “I should really know better.”

A ray of sun shot through the curtains at just the right moment; I had to move because the sun was in my eyes. “Speaking of the sun. What exactly does Jade Irinka have to do with Skaia?”

“I think it’s best to show you at the temple,” she said. “Are you free on Thursday? I was planning to go to Little Island then anyway.”


	5. All the Worlds

## 1

We took the ferry over to Little Island. It was nearly empty this run, but not quite so; there were a couple of people who gravitated towards the back of the ship, and the ferryman went with them.

We sat in the front, away from them all. I trailed my fingers in the water.

“What do you think we’re here for? I mean… ultimately.” I fumbled for words. “I mean, is there any particular higher purpose you believe in?”

“I don’t know,” said Joyce, who’d closed her eyes and was presumably contemplating the insides of her eyelids. “But I know that I should be good to people. I know that I should maintain hope. It’s damned hard, but usually, I manage. You?”

“If I already had one, I wouldn’t be asking you for one I could borrow.” I pulled my hand out of the water, and studied the dripping from my fingers. “I used to be about protecting people. From themselves, and from the world. But…”

“But there are some people you can’t protect. And some people whose welfare you can’t foster by protecting them. And the world’s too big.”

“Yeah.”

“If it helps,” said Joyce, “most people know what kind of help they need. Try asking them what you can do.”

* * *

## 2

It felt good. The island, I mean. I didn’t know why it felt good until we’d taken the little rutted dirt paths nearly all the way to the Temple.

“The Whisperings,” I said, to Joyce, feeling a bit disappointed when they suddenly cut out. “They’re on this island - except for here.”

Joyce giggled, softly. “Well, you’re not wrong. Here they call it the narrator, though, and it’s the same for everyone, and there’s no penalty for not following it. But yeah, I get the feeling too.”

I listened for it again, in vain. There were birdhouses and windchimes swinging softly in the wind. There was tall grass and the occasional clump of wild-looking daisies, along the path. We ascended a long set of stairs cut into a hillside. And then there was a temple.

I cannot describe the temple. I can only say that the greatest church or temple that I’d ever visited on Earth felt… less sacred. This place was palpably sanctified. The mind grows contemplative, upon the steps of the temple of Jade Irinka; and I think that is a property of the place, and not just a mere byproduct of its construction, as it would have been on Earth.

We came to the threshold; and Joyce pulled the doors open; and we went inside.

* * *

## 3

Joyce kneeled in front of a great statue, the biggest one in the room, and motioned for me to do the same. “Jade Irinka, angel of the houses of the sun,” she recited. “They say she provided light to all the worlds, no matter how distant and alien and strange…”

The tiles of the floor were cool beneath my hands. The smell of incense wafted through, from censers that hung in little alcoves dotted around the room. A shaft of sunlight sat gently upon the floor, centered on a track of sky blue floor tiles and white writing - recording where the sun would shine, and measuring time like a sundial. If I read the tiles correctly, the circle of sunlight would sit upon Jade Irinka’s brow at high noon on midsummer’s day.

Joyce was still talking. “And they say that the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy, who was her lover, shot her. And so she fell.”

The sound of windchimes drifted in through an open window.

“And then there was a miracle. The sun was reborn, and shines again. We live still. I do not know why. I only know it is more than any of us deserve.”

I looked at Joyce, sharply; she opened her eyes. “I didn’t know you were religious,” I said.

“I’m not,” she said. “I think this is real.”

* * *

## 4

We found the priestess in one of the side-rooms off the main worship hall. She filled a pendulum with colored sand, and pulled it back, and it swung around in rotating ovals, dispensing sand from a little hole at the bottom of the pendulum onto a twelve-sided table.

“A spirograph,” I said out loud, after the pendulum had completed its sixth swing or so. “Why?”

Joyce looked at me as if to stop me from talking, but the priestess only smiled. “It is a symbol of infinity, of the many worlds that She gave light to. The twelve points on the spirograph-drawing platform symbolize the twelve elements that give birth to universes -”

“Light, Void, Heart, Mind, Rage, Hope, Time, Space, Life, Doom, Blood, and Breath,” I said, quickly.

“I see,” said the priestess, who remained standing, staring at the pendulum, her arms crossed and tucked into her great bell sleeves.

“Wait, what do you see? Those are from a game I played -”

“A game that gives birth to universes,” added Joyce, “before you forget.”

“Sburb,” said the priestess, turning to us, “was what Jade Irinka was working on, when she died.”

“She’s new here,” explained Joyce, because all I could do was stare.

* * *

## 5

The priestess showed us into what looked like a back hall, through an unmarked door, and to a room; within the room was a scale model of an Incipisphere - although it had twelve planets, and not eight as mine had.

“We only open this room to Players,” she said, to me. “It wasn’t supposed to be open at all, but then… well. Then everything changed.”

Joyce nodded. “Thank you. Could you set the orrery turning?”

“Of course,” said the priestess; and she left, and a moment later a roof shutter closed, and a light burst into life inside the model Skaia, and we were bathed in the glow of it. The planets turned. The belt of tiny silver nuggets that was the Veil turned, more slowly. The dream moons were delicate blown-glass bulbs, similarly lighted to Skaia, although far less brightly.

“This is what we know,” said Joyce, her face lighted from below in pale blue with white traceries. “We know that Sburb was a project that was supposed to create new universes, and new gods and goddesses to go with them. The Horrorterrors were supposed to be these gods and goddesses. We were there to provide… randomness, and auspiciousness, and imprint our idiosyncratic loves and desires on the universes we were helping to create.”

I studied the Veil; the silver nuggets were suspended with fishing-line from a ring of some sort of dark glass.

“You can’t just create universes assembly-line style. If there’s no difference between all those universes, then there’s no purpose creating more than one. It was Jade who had the idea of introducing human players, and it was Jade who spoke the miracles that tied the first Horrorterrors to the resulting universe, inextricably intertwining our fates.”

It was difficult to see, but the planets were suspended by way of very thin rods connecting them to Skaia. Delicate spirographs of wire were threaded along these rods’ length. They were not to scale, but they would’ve been impossible to see if they were to scale.

“We’d been working _with_ them, then - the Gods of the Furthest Ring - and though we called them the Horrorterrors, they were not… not evil. Just alien. Jade Irinka’s death broke that symmetry. Now they hunt you, they sell you to the Bleak Academy, and… ultimately, we don’t really understand how that happened.”

I watched model Prospit and Derse turn. Prospit’s moon merely passed near Skaia rather than dipping into its atmosphere, although I’d excuse that, as it would be rather difficult to make glass bulbs intersect. When Derse’s moon was facing all the way outwards - when it was in eclipse - the bulb flickered out briefly. I wondered if that was intentional.

“I’ve been asking around,” Joyce concluded. “And I’d - _we’d_ \- like to ask you to help us with investigating the Bleak Academy. Because you’re the only one we know who went there and back without becoming one of them.”

“I think,” I said, “it’s best if I sit on this for a while before I decide. And I think I need to tell Anya.”

“Of course,” Joyce said. “Take your time.”

* * *

## 6

I’m writing this on the ferry back. The Headmaster shows up whenever I tell people about this. The Headmaster _doesn’t_ show up if I write about him in this diary.

I could always just show this to Anya. I’m not sure it’ll be safe, but it’s the only way I can think of to tell her the truth.

As the sun sets, it lights a path of gold across the surface of Big Lake. I think I should put my diary away and enjoy the ride. I can worry about this later, when I get home.

…I wonder when Anya’s place became “home”.

* * *

## 7

This is what she wrote back to me:

Dear Danielle Wattson,

I always did think you were a very strange young woman, and it is at least comforting to know that this strangeness has a cause, even if you cannot tell it to me out loud.

And I am glad to have trusted you with Phillip. You have been as good to him as he has been to you. While you were out on Little Island, one of his friends fell from the roof and broke a leg. Phillip kept his head and helped organize who was going to call for help, who was going to go to the nearest cross street and point the doctor in the right direction, and who was going to help keep this friend comfortable. That is a nature that will take him a long way, and you have been very good at cultivating it.

And I suppose I can answer your last question:

This place became home when you decided to stay.

Anna “Anya” Rybakova

* * *

## 8

I still don’t totally believe it. That an angel who was the sun existed, and that she got shot down and reborn, and that there was a thing in Skaia -

But it’s the best thing I can think of to explain what happened.

Phillip boasted to me about being an “emergency ‘ponder”. It was cute. I wasn’t really listening to it, though. I was thinking.

What, exactly, does investigating the Bleak Academy _entail_?

Do I need to go back again?

I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back through the Outside. It’s wanted me back a lot less, recently, and the pressure’s receding. But I’m still afraid.

I survived it once. I’m not sure if I could survive a second time.

* * *

## 9

Joyce was kneeling on the floor, sketching something out on a big piece of butcher paper. Half a dozen other Players - I’d been introduced to them, but I couldn’t quite put name to face yet - were sitting around. I was introduced as… well, Joyce must have told them ahead of time, because though a few people raised their eyebrows when introduced to me nobody reacted truly badly.

The thing taking shape on the floor was some sort of web of associations. Jade Irinka worked on Sburb with the Horrorterrors. Then she died. The Horrorterrors made a deal with the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy. They now send Sburb players to the Bleak Academy. The Headmaster was the one who killed Jade. And we Sburb players… where, exactly, did we come in?

“We are, as far as we know, a precious resource, because we’ve developed powers even they can’t create on their own,” commented an older man, salt and pepper growing in his beard. He carried a satchel with the Time symbol stitched onto it. I recalled, vaguely, that his name was Nadim. “They can enhance our powers, but they haven’t been able to create our magic without already having something to build on.”

“Right. They said at some point,” I said, “that they were used to working with something called Estates, and that we didn’t have those but our assortments of other powers were about as good.”

Joyce was presently drawing a big rectangle, connecting it to several of the other symbols on the paper. Then she spoke: “I think we should try to see what’s inside the Methodology Building. It’s close enough, and it might have something useful.”

I’d been there once before. It was… strangely slippery, when I tried to remember what happened in there. Like there was something interfering with my mind, or my Mind. I wanted to go back, if only to see if I could clarify those memories.

As it turns out, this was a mistake.

* * *

## 10

There is an egg in the heart of the void.  
I saw it, once. It rings faintly, when you touch it.

They say that I could have been a Magister of the Bleak Academy.  
They say I should have unmade myself  
and inverted myself  
and turned my sense of self inside out  
but I could not.

It would have been easier, to do so. But I could not.

There is an egg in the heart of the void.  
I saw it, once. It glows ivory, softly.

There is perhaps a truth being born inside it, because it is an egg.  
They say eggs can symbolize fertility  
and divinity  
and there is far more to it than that  
but I don’t know.

I wanted to believe that their truth was worth it. But I could not.

There is an egg in the heart of the void.  
I saw it, once. It has within it a world.

There is a truth inside that egg, and I could have reached it.  
And I tried to unmake myself  
and invert myself  
and turn my sense of self inside out  
but I could not.

The truth of the egg is closed to me.

I know only the shape of its shell.

* * *

## 11

I went in with nothing, and I came out with -

At least now I know what’s inside. The Outside is inside.

Within the Methodology Building, there _is_ no inside.

There is only outside. There is only The Outside.

I left the building clutching a crystal the size of my fist, made of pure Outside dust. None of the others came out with me.

They trickled out, one by one, over the next few days, I found, later. But at the time I didn’t know.

* * *

## 12

The sane response to suddenly being in possession of refined Outside dust would be to shove it in the direction of a shrine family and run the hell away.

I tried. I really did. But I couldn’t give it away. I couldn’t have someone _take_ it away, either, because I didn’t want Joyce or Anya or Nadim or anyone to end up with this thing stuck to them in the same way, and I felt like that’s what would happen if I made someone try.

It wouldn’t leave.

I dreamt of the Headmaster.

I dreamt of all the worlds he’s prevented from existing, to make his point.

I dreamt of the universe I could’ve inherited, choked with Outside dust. I dreamt of the Horrorterrors, under layers of the Outside. I dreamt of the Outside dust settling, eating, through everything I’ve ever known.


	6. The Headmaster's Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some decisions cannot be taken back.

## 1

The first thing I heard that was solid, that I could grasp, was a girl’s voice.

“I think there’s something over here!”

There was a girl, and then there was a boy, and they found –

“The measurements do, indeed, imply an abnormality,” said a strangely familiar male voice.

I started shouting and waving - “I’m here, I’m here!” - and then they burst through the Outside and I was tackled by a tanned young woman, with a bemused Leonardo de Montreal following close behind her.

* * *

## 2

I’d had days of increasingly delirious dreams, days of the stone of Outside dust sifting slowly through my mind. And then I was thrown, bodily, back into the impossible Outside.

The Outside was not as I remembered it; but then again, it never is. The overarching experience of the unknown may be the same, but the details have always dizzily, kaleidoscopically recombined themselves. After all, if it was the same all the way through, you’d get used to it eventually.

Anya later showed me that the dust had eaten away so thoroughly at my room that part of the roof had collapsed. I was horrified, but Anya said she’d figure things out. I flatly refused to sleep in the house, after that. I put up a tent in their courtyard.

I have no idea how they’re finding the money to pay for the repairs. I don’t think “we’ll manage somehow” pays for carpenters.

* * *

## 3

They brought me back to Leonardo’s house in Old Molder. It took a few hours of him squinting at some weird sextant-thing, and her - “Jasper”, she introduced herself - uncurling a tendril out of her hair and “sniffing the wind” with it.

(That’s how she explained it, anyway. It makes exactly as much sense now as it did back then.)

And who else was there at Leonardo’s house? Joyce, that’s who. Joyce waved off my questions - “the restaurant can survive a couple days without me” - and told me that I needed to lie down. “I’m going to put this over your face,” she said, and draped a wet towel over my head. Which was just the thing to cut through the increasing headache I had just then.

“Perfectly normal, after extended exposure to essence of unbeing,” said Leonardo, before I asked. “But what in the name of Jade Irinka drove you to gallivant and gambol out _there_? The Outside is not a running track, or a fairground, or god forbid a marathon course.”

I closed my eyes, since I had nothing to say to that.

Joyce made an uncertain noise; and, when it was met with silence, continued: “I think I can explain.”

* * *

## 4

Apparently I’d completely disappeared after the Methodology Building expedition - I started to explain about the block of pure Outside dust, but Joyce said she wanted to finish talking - and, after a great deal of fruitless questioning of everyone she could easily find, she decided to go with the least unreasonable option she had left:

Chasing down the guy who’d accosted me and caused her to teleport us halfway across Fortitude.

She wasn’t actually sure where to start, but after asking a few questions in the right places, she’d narrowed things down enough. She made her way to Old Molder, started poking around, and found Jasper carrying a picnic basket.

“Coincidentally also on my way to Leo’s house,” added Jasper. “So I showed her in.”

What would’ve been a very tense introduction was softened by Jasper’s intercession, and eventually they figured out that between the three of them, Leonardo and Jasper were best equipped to go Outside-spelunking. Joyce stayed behind to await my re-arrival.

As far as everyone could tell I’d been lost for half a month.

“Not that we escaped unscathed from Methodology either,” Joyce continued, and outlined more costs: nightmares, missing memories, old scars changing shape, someone who still couldn’t speak. And the trip turned out to be fruitless, in terms of information-gathering.

“So I led all of you in there for nothing.” I rubbed my eyes.

“Not nothing. Never nothing. We learned that it’s not worth going in with those intentions ever again. That’s still valuable information.”

It was at this point that Jasper decided to join the conversation. “Um. I’m not sure if I’m understanding this right, but you were… trying to break into the Methodology Building? Why?”

* * *

## 5

I groaned and rolled over, hiding my face in the couch cushions. Not now. This was a stupid question and it would have a stupid answer and I was stupid for allowing anything to happen and -

“Danielle?” Jasper’s voice was soft, but insistent. “Do you need a nap? Aunt Estelle says that naps are good for humans.”

“No,” I said. “It’s just… Joyce has been involved in this longer than I have. I’m not going to explain it as well as her.”

There was a rustling noise. Someone had decided to throw a blanket on top of me anyway. I left it there.

“So,” Joyce began, “back when Jade Irinka was the angel of the houses of the sun, she got involved in a project to make new worlds…”

* * *

## 6

I assume I fell asleep at some point during the story. I can’t quite remember exactly when. Only that when I woke up it was barely dawn the next morning, and there was Jasper, beaming right in front of my face.

“Hi! Did you want breakfast? I made the kind of toast with a cut-out hole and a fried egg inside. It’s supposed to look like the sun!”

I managed to smile, wearily. “Thank you, Jasper…? Wait, what was your last name?”

“Did I not tell you? Jasper Irinka!”

“…like Jade Irinka.”

“Yeah,” she said, suddenly glancing away. “Jade Irinka was my mom.”

I’d heard many stories about Jade Irinka. Who couldn’t, in Fortitude, with a house full of children? “So, if Jade was your mom, that means…”

“The Headmaster of the Bleak Academy was my dad, yeah.”

* * *

## 7

Jasper Irinka watched me pick at my toast for a while, and decided to engage me in conversation. “So how’d you meet Leo?”

“I…” I put my toast down; took a deep breath. “The Headmaster doesn’t like it when I talk about it. Maybe he thinks it reflects poorly on him…?”

“Is my dad… interested in you? Does he show up -” Jasper gestured expansively, to indicate Town - “here?”

“If I speak in detail, yes.” I spotted a pad of paper on the end table, grabbed it, and scribbled _I escaped the Bleak Academy_.

Jasper, the child of the sun, contemplated this for a moment. “He wants you.”

“To take me back?”

“No, not like that. He wants _you_. Your essence, that defied his creation. It’s hard to impress him these days; it makes him really happy when he finds someone like you. So he wants to examine what makes you tick.” Jasper Irinka suddenly looked deadly serious; her eyes shone silver when she turned to stare at me. “It just so happens that the process involves killing you.”

* * *

## 8

“You must understand.” Jasper stood up, eyes still silver-bleak. “When my father sets his sights on something, he cannot be denied.”

“Your eyes changed.” It was the only thing I could think of to say.

“They do that,” she said.

“Well, no, I mean - _you_ changed?”

“What, are you saying you prefer the me in gold?” The Headmaster’s daughter chuckled thinly. “It wasn’t worth giving you hope, if you’re facing the Headmaster. Resigning yourself to your fate is the best you can do. The facts are the facts.”

And the facts were… what? That I was already doomed? That I was facing The Lord of Death’s Domain? That he wanted to steal my essence in order to later dissect it at his leisure? Sure, those were facts.

The notion that I should give up, though - _that_ was not a fact. That was an opinion.

“I would prefer to survive.” I put my empty plate down on the end table. “So I would prefer hope.”

* * *

## 9

I sat alone with my thoughts for an hour before Leonardo and Joyce, late risers both of them, came down the stairs.

“Where’d Jasper go?” Joyce looked around inquiringly.

“She went all silver and weird, and then she left,” I said. “Apparently her dad is impressed with my essence and wants to take it for himself.”

“She does that,” said Leonardo. “To be overtaken by the blood of the Bleak Academy that runs through her veins, falling star silver inextricably intertwined with the light of hope. Perhaps it might be –”

I interrupted before he got too far into his monologue. “Death is after me. I need a game plan.”

Leonardo squinted at me. “What happened to you being a doormat for eight-year-old children?”

“I can’t very well take care of them if I’m dead.”

“Right. Just asking.” Leonardo picked up the pad of paper, flipped to a fresh page, and began drawing diagrams. “What Jasper was alluding to is the practice that Warmains call ‘tempering’, taking on the face, name, and fate of an honorable enemy. This practice is chiefly characterized by the reassignment of dharma through an anti-alchemical process…”

* * *

## 10

“Is there a way to get a Warmain to give up? I have to ask,” said Joyce. “I mean, we can’t exactly go _kill_ the Headmaster.”

Leonardo chewed on the end of his pen. “Well, I suppose you could fail the winnowing. But it seems to be a bit late for that, so… I guess you could make it more trouble than it’s worth? Compromise, and offer yourself in service rather than in full spirit? Displace their attention to someone else with comparable merits? Demonstrate that their test is not relevant to what they truly want to achieve?”

“I would _never_ throw someone else into the fire to save my own skin,” I said.

“Well, at least that makes things simpler,” said Leonardo. “I should inform you, though, that the Headmaster still wants you to be his Emissary to the Horrorterrors, so you already have an avenue for compromise. If he can’t get you to do it, he’ll take your essence and do it himself.”

I stared.

Leonardo gestured towards his chest, and the hole within.

“Well, at least cooperation will give me more time in which to work things out.” I closed my eyes. “I’ll do it.”

* * *

## 11

It took me another week to actually put that decision into practice.

I returned to Fortitude. I wrote down what happened in this diary. I helped with reconstructing the room I’d ruined. Three of the older Rybakov cousins conspired to lift my tent and put it right back into the room; and after about four of these pranks, I gave up and slept in the room - my room - again. I stared at my eyes in the mirror.

I worded my acceptance carefully. I neatly copied my final draft onto heavy cream paper. I folded the paper into an envelope; and on the envelope I wrote “To Methodology Building”. I sealed the envelope, and carried it down to the post office.

Then I tried to put it completely out of mind.

It wasn’t until December that Jasper Irinka, silver-eyed, showed up at my door to let me know that the Headmaster had accepted.


	7. And Through The Darkness, Light

## 1

The air sitting on the surface of the lake was at that particular temperature where you could call it neither muggy nor clammy. I’d come the dock by night. You can’t reach the Furthest Ring through the Lake when the sun is out, because the Horrorterrors are through the star-filled sky.

I walked to the dock number I’d been given; double-checked it. I pulled the pre-arranged token out of my pocket, cupped it in my hand; held it up before me.

It was a sphere of purest darkness; light and shadow alike fell onto its surface and drowned.

I held the darkness high, and stood silently. I was looking for signs of movement on the boats when I caught a faint swishing in the corner of my eye –

A figure in a hooded cloak stepped down from the air, landed on the pier gently, and glided towards me.

“I am a boatman. I will take you to the Ring where the Horrorterrors lie.”

* * *

## 2

The dark-cloaked boatman led me onto a boat that did not have a mast, and took up a long pole with what looked like a silver salt-shaker on the end.

I looked, inquiringly, at the alleged salt-shaker. “Sniffer,” the boatman said, by way of explanation. “The winds of the Outside are more reliable for navigation than anything else out there.”

“Well, at least it isn’t a sickle,” I said, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

The boatman made a few short rumbling noises - a chuckle? “I am not Death. Death would be he, the Headmaster. And besides, this is a round trip.” He reached hands - yes, definitely more than two hands - towards the controls, and flipped switches and spun controls until several of them began glowing. A brief whirring as the ropes untied themselves and were reeled into the boat on motorized spindles; and then silence.

The boat glided on into the lake. I looked back. I could just see a sliver of the new moon rising, behind the Fortitude hills.

* * *

## 3

The Outside smelled earthy - marshes? River silt? Something brackish, anyway - when I awoke on the second day of the journey. I’d come to fear the Outside by land; but the Outside by sea was, if not more sensible, at least less frightening. There was a boat, and I knew it was solid, and the boatman knew it was solid too; and so I could sleep without wondering if I would wake up stripped of context in a formless void.

We took shifts. The boatman told me what lights were worth rousing him for, and I occupied myself by examining the charts. They were half map, half pop-up book. At one point a spiral of paper was glued across two different pages, both sides painstakingly covered with lines and notes. At another point, a folded-flat Mobius strip (similarly decorated) had been slipped in like a bookmark. “Opening a long-expected package.” “Green.” “Do not drink the water.” “Sitting on a porch during a light rain.” “Duodecimals.” “Deja vu.”

On the fifth day, the boatman found the correct sort of darkness, and soon afterwards I was staring ahead at a landscape I recognized from before: iridescent bubbles suspended in a sea of stars. The dreamers and the dead. The sessions of Sburb. The Horrorterrors in what should have been the space beyond spaces, the time beyond times. But even so, it was not the true void. It had form, and it was navigable, and one could map and understand it.

And that was the problem.

“This is the place,” said the boatman, finally. “I hope you find what you seek. When you need to return, hold your token up high again, and I will find you.”

I nodded. “Thank you for the ride.” And I steeled myself, and jumped into the darkness.

As I flew on, looking for anything that indicated that I was going in the right direction, I thought:

I had played at being a deathless god. Now I was to meet the real thing.

* * *

## 4

A bonfire, crackling. Spicy sausages on a toasting-fork. Laughter.

“Hey,” one called out to me, “are those done yet?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, and turned the sausages again. Almost burnt, but not quite.

The coplayer - which coplayer? - toasted a hot dog bun over the flames next to me. “Ready when you are.”

I flung the sausages off the fork into the air and - oh, it was the Time player then - the Time player blurred into action, catching every sausage in a hot dog bun before it hit the ground. The last one bounced off my head and onto the plate I’d put next to me.

Parlor tricks, maybe. But also practicing accuracy under time-dilation. So I let them play their games –

* * *

## 5

Wait. Why had I just remembered that? I’d just thought about playing at being a god –

But that memory reminded me that games are not just play. They are preparation for the real thing. Did that mean I was, in fact, really a god?

I felt a faint smile playing on my lips. I hadn’t put it there –

A mental image. Joyce saying that the Horrorterrors weren’t evil – just alien –

Alien. Derse’s libraries said they spoke in whispers, but what did I actually experience during the Eclipses? I was musing over my past –

So that was how they communicated, then. Of course they didn’t speak in human language. They spoke in memories. And I didn’t need to go find them; I was already in their presence.

_Hello_ , I thought. _I’d like to speak to the manager._

And then I waited, mind cleared and waiting for an answer, for what might have been minutes or years or millennia.

* * *

## 6

After a vast (and quite possibly infinite) stretch of time, images began flashing through my mind’s eye – the Queen’s ring, softly glowing, around her beetle-black finger – the aura of authority that the Rage player at the Academy had –

I was talking to whoever was in charge now, then. Was it a ruler, or a ruling council? I supposed that it didn’t matter.

A startlingly gentle sense of curiosity found its way into my consciousness; and I recalled the Headmaster’s letter, white ink on dark paper, charging me with investigating why the Horrorterrors had been taking so long with the latest shipments.

“Taking so long”, then, touched off another series of images: that dizzying feeling when I stood upon the Canadian Shield and tried to comprehend the fact that the rock under my feet was four billion years old; that sense I had one night, when I had been left in an unfamiliar forest for far longer than I was usually left to fend for myself, that the “normal” life I had lived was a distant faint memory from a lifetime ago; an incident where I’d attempted to reason with my father that, since I’d done the laundry once, it should just _stay_ done and I shouldn’t have to do it again (and then my frustration when the laundry did not do itself). The globe of Skaia, in the orrery at Jade Irinka’s temple, unlit and unmoving.

I recognized, then, suddenly: the Horrorterrors did not really understand time as mortals would use it. They’d set up the Player recruiting mechanism as a one-time thing, a feedback loop that would repeat itself and automatically take care of the task for them. It might’ve even have worked, had all things stayed constant, but the sun came up again and bleached away the details of all their carefully laid plans.

They hadn’t agreed to a deal that required their constant response to the new conditions that arose, because they _couldn’t_ act reliably on a timescale of months and years. Only centuries.

“Think about whether your plans will really work before you execute them,” I’d told my coplayers, once. “Even the greatest of gods cannot save you from a mistaken assumption.”

* * *

## 7

_But surely,_ I thought, _you could just set it back up again now?_

Copying a symbol from an already-copied sheet of paper. Copying the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy, each iteration introducing quirks and flaws and inconsistencies… and a story I read about “image correction” software, in a particularly expensive copier, that silently replaced numbers with other numbers. Every last page of an essay landing in a pool of water and falling apart. An OUT OF TONER message.

What was done could not be precisely replicated; it would be different, this time – it could be silently flawed, and there would be no way of knowing. And besides, it wouldn’t work anyway, would it? The conditions have changed. A plan that worked in the dark would not work in the light.

_We could renegotiate the deal; I’m authorized to give you a certain amount of material and metaphysical assistance –_

This memory interrupted me before I even finished: the experience of learning how to swim. About how in the beginning it was cold, too cold; that at first I could only barely stay at the surface; that I had to practice using muscles that I never knew I had; that through long experience I stopped seeing bodies of water as impassable obstacles and started to see them in terms of how one would swim through them, places that could be understood and taken advantage of; about how after one spent long enough in the water it was possible to acclimate to that temperature, and even to enjoy the rush of jumping into water that was terribly cold, as long as it didn’t last too long –

The Horrorterrors no longer _cared_ about restoring the Void. All the important properties of the Furthest Ring were still there, despite the Outside - it was still a realm of strange time and space that they and only they could understand. The Outside simply added new layers of experience. Things were more interesting, once they grew the senses needed to appreciate it. They _liked_ it.

They no longer had any desire to honor a deal they couldn’t fulfill anyway.

The deal was off. I would have to tell the Headmaster that the deal was off. How the hell would I do that?

* * *

## 8

I hadn’t thought about what would happen to me, afterwards. It was the Horrorterrors who brought it up.

I remembered the Headmaster’s writing again. The written instructions I’d received. The suggestion that if I did well he would consider a stay on my Tempering.

And then a memory of Jasper: “You must understand,” she’d said, in the persona of the Headmaster’s daughter, with those silver eyes. “When my father sets his sights on something, he cannot be denied.”

And then a mental image: that hollow look Leonardo’d had on his face when he couldn’t distract the Headmaster from talking to Joyce and me, back on that rooftop, so long ago.

How would he judge my success on this errand? If I informed him that the Horrorterrors were incapable of fulfilling their end of the deal - not just unwilling - could he still reject that? And, even if I’d succeeded… he’d never assured me that I would survive. Only ever hinted at it, with phrases that never quite promised anything.

This was a trap.

I would be dead either way.

* * *

## 9

So I was in an Outside-flavored eldritch void filled with incomprehensible tentacle monsters, and I had just been told that I was going to be killed by someone who had been stalking me for most of a year. I’m… sure you can guess how I felt about that.

Presently, though, images: of a group picture taken with my coplayers. Of making dumplings with Joyce. Of meeting with the other ex-Sburb players, in that room in Fortitude. Of the kind of power that I knew that the Game gave everyone who played it.

They did not need protecting. They matched my level of power. And the last time we worked together –

_there is a perhaps a truth being born inside it, because it is an egg_

– the Methodology building tore us apart –

_i saw it, once; it has within it a world_

– a burst of memory, suddenly, unearthed from somewhere I’d thought was white noise and static –

_the truth of the egg is closed to me / I know only the shape of its shell_

As soon as I touched the Outside, as soon as I knew that the inside of the Methodology Building contained the unknown, I _expected_ that everyone was going to die, and that expectation colored every choice I made thereafter. I _expected_ the investigators to be chewed and spat out in pieces, and so I’d been sending people off in ones and twos (hoping that at least some of us would survive even if others were picked off) rather than storming it as a group.

And they had _trusted_ me, trusted that I knew what I was doing because I had been there before. But my experiences with the Bleak had convinced me that whatever I did didn’t matter, and that anything beyond survival was a hopeless aim.

_That’s_ why the Methodology Building tore us apart.

* * *

## 10

At that point, the negotiation - if you can even call it that - was over.

I shouted into the void, for a while. No reply.

I thought about staying in the Furthest Ring forever, I really did. But the Headmaster would undoubtedly hunt me down even there, if not by himself then by sending someone else to look for me. And besides, it wasn’t exactly a place fit for human habitation.

I thought about hijacking the boat and piloting it somewhere else. The problem is I still didn’t know how to read the charts, so I would probably just get myself lost.

I thought about removing myself from existence. That wasn’t an answer, either, because something primal in me still insisted on staying alive. Also, I didn’t know how to make it stick through god-tier immortality.

For lack of anything better to do, I held out the beacon of darkness, and at length the boatman came to me. I said nothing to him as I boarded, and he started the boat in silence.

After the boat was well underway, he came to me, in the bow of the ship.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing behind my shoulder.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I told him.

“I’m still sorry anyway,” he replied. I said nothing.

He waited for several minutes, wondering if I would answer. I stood stock still. At length, he turned away and trudged back to the controls.

* * *

## 11

The knot of tension sat in my stomach like detritus in an unscreened rain-barrel. I couldn’t just sit there looking at the Outside. But I didn’t have anywhere to go, either.

I paced the deck. It was twenty-nine strides from bow to stern, and eight across. I don’t know why I counted that.

I didn’t eat anything. It wasn’t like there was a point doing that, anymore.

I read the charts. They made about as much sense as they did before, which is to say none whatsoever.

Eventually, at some point, I must have fallen asleep.

That’s when the miracle came.

* * *

## 12

“Danielle? Where are you?”

Someone was calling my name; and as I looked to see where the sound was coming from, a mist-wreathed figure emerged.

“Danielle!” The figure ran towards me, and resolved into the image of –

Anya?

“Oh thank Jade. Are you all right? No, silly question. We found the note you left on the dresser, it was the kind of note that people leave when they know they aren’t coming back, Phillip said that you’d been having messengers from Hayashi’s archive, so I asked around there and - and - ”

I stopped her. “Slow down a bit. What’s going on here?”

Anya gulped. “This is a dream. Your friend, _the incomparable Leonardo de Montreal_ \- ” I giggled despite myself at Anya’s Leonardo impression - “told me you were probably still alive, just very far away doing something. He said that the best way of contacting you was through dreams, but that even though he had the equipment it was too dangerous for him to do it. Something about his heart? He said to ask the Sosunovs for help.”

The family from Fortitude that had dream magic. Right.

“Phillip tried to volunteer, by climbing through the Sosunovs’ windows. They kicked him out; he’s too young to do this safely. They had to do things with drugs to get this to work, and this is the soonest I could get to you.” A nervous giggle. “Anyway. What’s going on?”

* * *

## 13

So there was an obvious first question I had to ask. “Is this safe? Nobody’s listening in, right?”

“Leonardo’s doing something to make this connection safe from eavesdroppers, at least while it’s running. The Headmaster knows you can’t do this yourself, so he won’t be looking for magic like this. And Presley Sosunov is helping me maintain the link, and will memorize any instructions you give here. He says he’s promised to secrecy, but there’s not much we can do if he gets plucked off the street tomorrow or something.” Anya frowned. “Leonardo said you’d know it was him if I said something about the temperature of your dismay…?”

Oh. I recognized that phrasing. Leonardo was definitely involved somehow, then, and I had no particular reason to distrust Anya. Either that, or he and Anya had simultaneously been kidnapped by the Headmaster and… well, there was nothing I could do about that, so there was no point thinking about it.

If this was really Anya, then, I had a chance. It was a small chance, but… well, what else was I going to do? Die? Not if I had a say in the matter.

“I’m on a boat in the Outside right now. I’ll be arriving at the Kiri docks in fifty-seven to sixty-two hours. You’ll need to find someone named Joyce - Leonardo’ll know where - and tell her that she needs to show up there and bring all the ex-Sburbanites with her. I know what I did wrong the last time I was with them, and I think if all of them show up in full force we should be able to make things… not worth it, for the Headmaster. Tell Phillip he should stay out of the way, but since he’ll probably insist on seeing me come in anyway, he needs to watch from the roofs in the next district over.”

Anya nodded. “Okay. Find Joyce, tell her to get all the other ex-Sburbanites, you’ll take 57 to 62 hours to get to the Kiri docks, keep Phillip out of the way. Got it. Oh, and this is from Phillip.” Anya hugged me tightly.

I hugged her back. “If this doesn’t work, the next book I wanted Phillip to read is in my sock drawer.”

She nodded, against my shoulder. I felt her tears.

* * *

## 14

It was just before dawn when the boat slid out onto Big Lake. I leaned against the rail, wondering if I could outpace the Headmaster with my god-tier flight. If he decided to fly at me instead of just walking over and grabbing me by the scruff, that is.

The birds were singing dawn into the sky. A few streaks of sunlight had already uncurled themselves onto the clouds. The fishermen bustled about on the docks, getting ready for the day’s sailing, and their lanterns spilled pools of light out onto the water.

I knew I would remember this scene for the rest of my life. However long the rest of my life would be.

But soon - too soon - we were already drawing close to the docks. The boatman glanced back and forth between his switch panel and the shore of the Lake, intent on his work. I had little to do but gather myself and wait.

As the boatman climbed out and tied down the boat, I looked out at a scrum of ex-Sburbans - some in their god-tier hoods, some in the rough garb of Fortitude’s sailors. Joyce waved at me. So did a few others.

All too soon, the boatman gestured for me to disembark.

* * *

## 15

Weeks spent on a boat, or in alien geometries, made solid ground swim before me. I looked down at my feet, trying to remember how walking on land worked.

Then I looked up, and saw two night-black eyes filled with stars.

“You,” I said, weakly, to the Headmaster.

“Me,” he agreed, offering a hand, as the stars began to fall from the skies around us. “Shall we walk?”

“I suppose I can’t say no,” I said, and he laughed -

But presently he stopped, and frowned. “It seems someone is trying to interfere with our privacy. Would you mind - ”

In the east, the sky tore open, and in poured the sun.

* * *

## 16

As I turned, the light resolved into the form of a young woman, eyes blazing a fierce gold, holding the sky open with three arms. Jasper Irinka. She pushed, and the velvet-black sky of a Far and Sunless Land cracked into a thousand pieces. The shattered fragments of night rained down from the sky, slowly; they had a very long way to fall. (People were fishing them out of the Lake for months afterwards.)

And behind Jasper, the child of the sun, marched a hundred of the children of Skaia.

The Headmaster looked at Jasper; looked at the Sburb players behind her; looked at Jasper. “What is the meaning of this?”

“You’re not taking her,” hollered Joyce. “Not if we have any say in the matter.” A few others shouted assent.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to my daughter.” The Headmaster seemed, if anything, amused. “So this is what the mortals call teenage rebellion.”

Jasper glared at him. “You don’t threaten my friends.”

The Headmaster raised a hand. “You’ve known her for all of two months.”

“That still counts as friends.”

“I am your father.”

“Even if blood is thicker than water, pancake syrup is thicker than blood. We had pancakes together. So we’re friends.” Jasper Irinka crossed her arms. “Also, she has a lot of other friends here, and you didn’t bring any.”

“I didn’t need to,” said the Headmaster. “I brought myself.”

* * *

## 17

And presently, the Headmaster turned to me. “You do realize,” he said, icily, “you will _never_ escape me.”

I stood there, frozen.

“I am Death, Death Unending, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy. I am not a person who happens to have control of a primordial force. I am the primordial force itself.

“Why do you think gods from Sburb must die, in the end? I was Jade Irinka’s lover. I whispered into her ear that, in the end, all things must either die or cease to exert a force on the world. You have a disposition that will not let you settle in the safety between Heroic and Just. You will eventually reach for one or the other, and in so doing, you will be extinguished.

“When you dream, I will be there to take it away as soon as you wake. When you outlive precious Phillip and his aunt, it will be because I have taken them. I do not have to take you now. I can wait. Ten years, a hundred, a thousand; it makes little difference to me.

“Enjoy your life, between now and then, if you wish. Make your ripples. Build your sandcastles. It makes no difference to me. Eventually, you will give up. And I will be there, waiting.”

An eyeblink, and he was gone, and I was lying on the dock staring up at the sky.

“I lost,” I said, dizzily, to nobody in particular. It seemed very important to me, at the time, that everyone understand what had just happened.

“We won,” Jasper said.

“No. _I_ lost.”

* * *

## 18

The next week or so was a blur.

I think they had to carry me home and put me to bed. A few of the other ex-Sburbanites popped in from time to time, to make sure I wasn’t kidnapped. Someone came over with soup. Someone else brought flowers. I slept through most of it.

When I finally properly woke up, Leonardo was sitting beside me, in a slant of afternoon sun.

“Looks like you’re awake. I’m not going to ask how you feel, because that’s a profoundly stupid question to ask of you in your condition. If I had to guess, probably like a few hundred spit-out cherry pits stuffed into the exhaust pipe of a car. Am I right?”

I rolled my eyes. “Close. More like watermelon seeds.”

“You pulled off an impressive stunt there, putting together such a show of force. And before you try to object, I wasn’t the one who did it, Anya wasn’t the one who did it, and Joyce wasn’t the one who did it. If you insist on trying to deflect credit further, I will be forced to conclude that it was actually Phillip’s doing.”

“…uh-huh?”

“He was the one who saw you and wanted to offer you a home here. Obviously he is completely responsible for everything you have done since. It makes as much sense as whatever you’ll claim happened.”

I had to laugh.

“Before you ask, Anya… is also recovering,” Leonardo said. “The Sosunov style of dream magic requires a vessel without self. For those not practiced in the appropriate mental disciplines, the only way to accomplish this is through extreme measures. She achieved what you needed at the time. This was the price.”

“Why would she do that for me?”

“Why would Jasper Irinka volunteer to be first as soon as she heard that you were coming in and needed someone to wait on the dock? Why would Phillip run off to find me on the path to Fortitude even before I’d received the telegram from the Archive? Why would Joyce and her fellows be willing to follow you, even after what happened the last time you tried? There is a commonality between all these answers. Since you seem to be more unintelligent than a child in this matter, this commonality starts with the letter D.”

I groaned, and swatted the air in his general direction.

“If you want an actual answer… you care about them. It shines through. And so they return the favor.”

* * *

## 19

We watched motes of dust in the air.

I eventually had to break the silence, because something was still bothering me. “I lost.”

Leonardo turned to me. “Oh?”

“He said he’ll be back for me. When I die. My immortality’s conditional. I _am_ going to die.”

“Yes. Eventually. But in the meantime…” He gestured expansively. “You can live your life. Isn’t that what you were fighting for?”

“You know that he put something in you. Does that not weigh on you?”

“Of course it does.”

“How do you live with it?”

Leonardo thought about it, for long enough that I wondered if he’d forgotten the question. The seagulls cried in the air. The Rybakov complex was warm with life: children running around whooping in the yard, stew cooking, the cousins having thoughtful conversations while shucking oysters, someone on the roof cleaning out the gutter-pipes.

Phillip was racing up the stairs, yelling: “Hey! Danielle! Wake up! I got an A in my math class!”

We glanced at each other. Finally, Leonardo said: “I live with it one day at a time.”

And then he got up to open the door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that sure was a ride! I hope you enjoyed it. You can find my other writing at [eternity-braid.tumblr.com](https://eternity-braid.tumblr.com).


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